"I’m not a nature photographer. It’s the inextricability of human society and nature that interests me.”
Mitch Epstein is among the most renowned American photographers of his generation. Five years after his American Power exhibition at the Fondation Cartier Bresson, he returns to Paris at the Galerie Les Filles du calvaire with New York Trees, Rocks & Clouds, a major trilogy showcased for the first time in France.
For more than four decades, and across the United States, Europe, India and Vietnam, Mitch Epstein has been photographing humankind’s relationship to nature, each other, and modern life.
With these last three series exhibited at the gallery, Mitch Epstein shifts his interest toward new motifs and photographic techniques. Employing an 8X10 camera, black and white film, and mural size prints, Epstein applies a unique approach to landscape: his pictures do not isolate nature but investigate it in juxtaposition to urban life. Indeed, when Epstein captures a whirling sky above glass and concrete, or a tortuous tree in the middle of a city, what he questions is humankind’s attempt to conquer or cohabitate with nature.
(extract - Sébastien Borderie)